Toy aisles are like Hollywood — every year there are more young faces and fewer of the old ones. There’s the new blood: Arthur, the Teletubbies, Bear in the Big Blue House, Pokémon, and Blue and her clues. Then come the middle-aged toys: the residents of Sesame Street, a Muppet…
Words like “amazing” and “wondrous” have been so overused that now they’re just a tad more meaningful than “neat” or “cool.” The boss’ new haircut isn’t merely nice, it’s fabulous. A fancy meal doesn’t just taste good, it’s spectacular. The words are cheapened, making it much more difficult to sound…
It’s a shock when you reach adulthood and realize that you’re not yet done with Shakespeare, that you didn’t leave him padlocked in your bologna-sandwich-smelling high-school locker or folded in a dog-eared college lit text at the campus bookstore. He’s out here in the grown-up world too. He waits at…
Kim Rody’s Fishart paintings likely feel right at home at the Dallas Aquarium in Fair Park. Around them swim the fish, shrimp, turtles, and other aquatic life forms that inspired (and occasionally modeled for) the artist. They also probably feel relieved. Some of Rody’s other Fishart paintings have hung in…
I’m stuck in the waiting room of a car-repair shop. My only companions are a humming cola vending machine, a gurgling coffee maker, and a blue iMac that–every few minutes, in a soft, raspy female voice–says “Please…touch me…now.” Though the computer probably is just selling maintenance agreements or car accessories,…
The kids were playing in three areas–the excavation site, fossil-rubbing station, and dinosaur book-and-toy table–when the adults disappeared around the corner into Texas Dinosaurs: Life and Death in the Big Bend. They had seen the strobe-light lightning bolts and heard the recorded sounds of a thunderstorm rolling from where they…
In the late ’70s, it was fashionable to predict that, by the year 2000, humans would be populating the moon. Man had first set foot there late in the previous decade, and surely in another 20 years or so, special space suits and biodomes could get us there on at…
For something that is nothing more than a big, fat fib, the curse on King Tut’s tomb has remarkable staying power. Death shall come to those who dare disturb this sanctuary. There are countless movies, stories, and songs written about it. It’s probably the best-known part of Egyptology, and it’s…
[DARYL] Communication: Duration (Urinine Records) Months ago, a friend leaned over to me at a club to say that if someone had predicted years ago that today she’d be watching (and, more important, loving) a band with keyboards, the suggestion would have been met with either violence or laughter, depending…
Photographs taken at crime scenes have become big business. Before television cameras rolled on Courtney Love’s running mascara, photographs of Kurt Cobain’s body were showing up on tabloid magazines and for sale in the underground press. Now the market has moved to the Internet, where a quick search will reveal…
Dating habits are not hereditary. If they were, Brett Leveridge’s first novel would be called My Mom Was a Big-Time Playa and So Am I instead of Men My Mom Dated (And Other Mostly True Tales). But maybe genetics isn’t to blame for poor Brett’s lack of dating success. After…
Audiences raised on Freddy flicks and Jason slasher movies won’t be scared by Nosferatu–Symphony of Horrors. They’re callused, desensitized to anything short of a blood bath on screen and an adrenaline rush off. Yet the 1922 film is still oddly disturbing and, unlike some other black-and-white silent films, hasn’t become…
It’s probably happened to everyone. I’ve watched something so hilarious, so brilliant, so truly a piece of comic genius that I have to share it with someone…well, everyone. So I relay the story, laughing loudly at each joke, while my friend stands with furrowed brow, eventually muttering “Hmmmm, yeah, sounds…
Mr. Conflict Give credit to Don Venable, the gadfly-turned-trustee-turned-gadfly again. He may have been out of public service for a while, but the former school board member still knows how to toss out a good sound bite. Venable, who is suing the Dallas Independent School District to block its plan…
Tripping Daisy Tripping Daisy (Good Records/Sugar Fix Recordings) The first thing you notice about the cover of Tripping Daisy’s new self-titled album isn’t the Brady Bunch motif, a tic-tac-toe board dotted with pictures of the band members and grapefruit halves. No, the eyes travel up and left past singer Tim…
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When I awoke from a dream a few mornings ago still hazy and feeling lost, I wondered, “Did I really just defend the Spice Girls when the police tried to arrest them for pornography? Was I really sticking up for them, or was I just trying to finish an interview…
ngel Munoz meets only one of the demographics of the gamers in his Cyberathlete Professional League. He’s male. He’s not Anglo, and, at 40 years old, he’s old enough to have fathered many of the 17- to 25-year-olds who flock to his tournaments to play Quake and compete for cash…
Poetry is for wimps — or so the stereotype goes. It’s a safe haven for overly sensitive tree-huggers who bare their souls. They’re not considered perceptive, or honest, or eloquent; no, these poets are labeled as rare beef: too tender and pink. Then there’s slam poetry, with its young, defiant…
Pick a night, any night, and likely one of Dallas’ more than a dozen improvisational comedy groups is performing at a club or restaurant somewhere between Deep Ellum and Addison. On Fridays and Saturdays several groups perform regular gigs at different clubs — some sparsely littered with people, others sold…
If the version of Cabaret opening at Fair Park Music Hall April 4 were based on the 1972 movie, casting Lea Thompson as Sally Bowles would be an understandable move. After all, in the movie Liza Minnelli transformed Sally into a plucky American singer trying to get discovered, performing in…
The action in most of Edward Albee’s plays are lips flapping, fingers pointing, and people pacing and occasionally changing seats. His plays — from 1966’s A Delicate Balance to 1994’s Three Tall Women — are all talk. This includes Seascape, his 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy Circle Theatre is currently producing…
